Isaac Starr

Sir Isaac Starr (13 March 1872-3 February 1915) was an Admiral of the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom who served in World War I. He was killed in the Battle off Sumatra by a naval Paixhans shell that hit the bridge of his command ship, HMS Dartmouth.

Biography
Isaac Starr was born in Cumberbatch in Surrey on 13 March 1872. His father Benjamin Starr (born Benyamin Starsky) was an immigrant from the Russian Empire and his mother Lydia Hobbes was born in England. His father was of Orthodox Jewish faith but converted to Protestantism upon his arrival in the United Kingdom.

Starr enrolled at the Naval Academy of Southampton in 1890 and graduated second in his class in 1893. He was formerly the captain of exploratory vessel HMS Apollo but later became an officer in the Royal Navy during the Anglo-German Naval Arms Race of the early 1900s and he captained HMS Dartmouth after 1909. After participating in multiple missions aboard the ship he became an Admiral in the Royal Navy and moved to Sydney, Australia, to become the commander of a British fleet stationed in the South Pacific Ocean.

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Starr was made commander of the South Pacific Fleet of the Royal Navy. He geared up his navy to include five battlecruisers, and saw limited action during the war against the Kriegsmarine around Kaiser-Wilhelmsland (German New Guinea), but in February 1915 he had his first and only major battle when he set out to relieve trade routes from a German fleet in the Battle off Sumatra.

Death off Sumatra
The Royal Navy's fleet of five battlecruisers faced ten German battleships off Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies, and the Germans opened the battle with a salvo of shells. After observing the German fleet from the deck, he moved into the bridge to command his fleet but a shell destroyed the bridge of the ship, killing Starr and his senior officers. However, the British eventually won the battle and Starr was posthumously knighted.